Two days after his damaging defeat in Pennsylvania last month, Barack Obama gathered his wife and senior campaign staff around the dining-room table of his Chicago home.

For two hours after dinner, Barack and Michelle Obama, campaign manager David Plouffe, message man David Axelrod, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and a handful of other close advisers hashed over the campaign's history, looked at the upcoming primaries and decided how the candidate would approach the coming two weeks. Obama wanted to get away from the sniping, including his own, and get back to the approachable, hopeful campaign of last winter's long sojourn in Iowa.

"It wasn't like 'Let's have a discussion.' It was 'One, two, three, four, here's what we're going to do,' " a staffer said.

"When things don't go well, he doesn't yell and scream. He's very prescriptive. Everybody understands this isn't about having a discussion. He's got 99 percent of the voting shares. There's no point in taking a vote."

Implored by some Democratic strategists to go more negative to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in North Carolina and finish her off in Indiana, Obama instead went "more intimate, less iconic," as one aide put it. There would be picnics, small gatherings, games of P-I-G in the backyards of basketball-crazy Indiana, his wife and two daughters in tow at times. And it appears to have worked.

Obama won North Carolina in a blowout Tuesday night, more than enough for his campaign to crow that he is mathematically on his way to the nomination.

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And his narrow loss in Indiana meant that Clinton's delegate advantage there will be small.

"He went back to his game, which is a positive, principled message," said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., one of Obama's liaisons with superdelegates. "There was a narrative by some that he needed to engage in the same type of campaign that Sen. Clinton was engaging in. But what Sen. Obama proved tonight was, the first thing he is going to change about America is how an American candidate for president gets elected."

The campaign schedule won't get any easier: West Virginia and Kentucky primaries over the next two Tuesdays that have the makings of major Clinton victories; an Oregon contest whose results will be delayed as mail-in ballots are tallied, diminishing the effect for Obama; and finales in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana next month that are unlikely to be resounding ratifications of his candidacy.

And questions about the breadth of Obama's appeal will linger, given his continuing difficulties among white voters, elderly Democrats, union households and rural towns.

But with Tuesday's delegate wins and popular-vote totals, the Obama campaign predicted the race will be effectively over before those final contests on June 3.

By engaging Clinton in a heated debate about a summer suspension of the gasoline tax, Obama was able to shift the campaign discourse away from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Key endorsements and a steady trickle of superdelegate support over the past week kept up some momentum.

"After going through the worst stretch of this campaign . . . Obama actually has come through in a stronger position than he started in three weeks ago," said Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., a supporter, "and he is tantalizingly close to wrapping up this nomination."

Rockies are on pace to lose 93 games this seasonThe Rockies lost three of four in St. Louis and are on pace to lose 93 games as they come home for a three-game series with Seattle before going back on the road again to face Washington.